Opened to great fanfare in 1867, Birnbeck Pier welcomed its first paddle steamer just a few days later, and it was this lucrative trade, bringing hoards of visitors from south Wales, that helped the pier enjoy a successful first 70-or-so years.

Initially, it was the closure of pubs in Wales on a Sunday, a law that lasted until 1911, that helped swell visitor numbers. More latterly though, it was the allure of the fun fair on Birnbeck Island, where the first of its major amusements, the legendery (and not  for the fainthearted), water chute opened in 1905.

Weston’s other pier, the Grand, had opened in 1904, and for almost 30 years it very much lived in Birnbeck’s shadow. However, this was to change when the Grand’s theatre burned down in 1930. Birnbeck was unlucky, not for the only time in its history, when this accident lead to a competing fun fair replacing the theatre three years later.

The Grand had tried to take a slice of Birnbeck’s steamer business with an unsuccessful, short-lived extension in 1907, but this vast new amusement pavilion, undercover and far more central, was an altogether more successful attempt to poach Birnbeck’s trade. The decline of the town’s older pier had begun.

The Second World War further accelerated this decline, when the Admirality took over the pier and island, designating it HMS Birnbeck and using it as a secret weapons testing site, including work on some of Barnes-Wallis’s ideas.

Post-war, Birnbeck has passed through the hands of seven owners.The last steamer sailed in 1979, Grade 2*-listed status was awarded in 1983, before closure to the public on safety grounds in 1994. The structure continued to deteriorate and became too dangerous even for the RNLI who ceased their operations on the island in 2014.